2014

This was a “creative work” I had to create for a class. I did a review, but since it had to relate back to a topic in the class this ends up being more about ideology then if the film is quality or not. Hence it being here and not a review.

It’s rare that action films have sufficient plot and character development, let alone any substantial themes and ideology to be analyzed. In the slog of action, sci-fi, and superhero films coming out of Hollywood, Snowpiercer shines bright as a unique thrill ride.

In the future the world has frozen over, forcing mankind into near extinction with the exception of a small faction that resides on an ever-moving train. Segregated to the back of the train are the poor and needy who in response to their seperation from the rich at the front of the train, decide to revolt. Led by Curtis (Chris Evans) and under the guidance of Gilliam (John Hurt), the mob pushes it way through the train. Along the way they uncover the secrets of the train’s operations and it’s creator Mr. Wilfred with the help of junkie technician Namgoong Minsoo (Kang-ho Song).

Chris Evans not only leads the rebellion, but leads the film as well. His strong performance keeps the film going at crucial points where the action dies down. Speaking of which, the film’s action scenes can be shaky at times, but still engrossing to watch. The rest of the cast is strong as well, particularly the brought over actors from director Joon-Ho Bong’s other film The Host.

Looking at Snowpiercer there’s the obvious themes of class divide and structures of society, but within that there’s an examination of ideology itself. Within the society that is the train, the doctrine of the train is sent through several ideological institutions. The poor are educated through religion, the word of those of a higher authority that they have to take on faith. “The Eternal Engine is sacred, Mr. Wilford is divine. So it is.” is repeated to create their world view. “So it is,” reinforces the ideological aspect of this statement as ideology by nature appears natural or “as it is.” The children are indoctrinated through school, educated in the world view that Mr. Wilford wants them to have.

When looking at cultural views that defy the mainstream, one notices that after a period of time the become incorporated back into the system. For example, the demonization of homosexuals slowly over time becomes worked into the ideology of the majority of a culture as wrong, despite being to some degree acceptable. When Curtis finally confronts Mr. Wilford, Wilford reveals that the entire rebellion was manufactured with the help of Gilliam. The film’s motif of “Everyone has their place” has been reinforced by the authority by incorporating rebellion into the ideological system, thus rendering it mute.

As the film comes to it’s end, the institution, which has lost its humanity through its methods, self-destructs and the society/train goes off the tracks, killing most of its members. The films message ultimately ends up being a cynical worldview, where the ideological institutions are both cruel and necessary to survival. It’s only when they are interrupted that the whole society crumbles, but in the wake of that destruction there is a glimmer of hope. In the wasteland of ice and snow, the survivors spot a polar bear, a sign of life.

With all this talk of ideology, we’ve ignored the central question of “Should you see Snowpiercer?” With it’s well-staged action scenes, fascinating premise, strong performances, and most importantly its ideological criticism, Snowpiercer is one of the most interesting action films you could watch this holiday break, if not the best.

Hello there cinephiles!
Reviews have been slow as of late, but in an attempt to keep content flowing I’ll be uploading a few essays I’ve written for class. They’re formal and not exactly fun to read, but I’m sure someone out there will be intrigued.

In other news, I just can’t stand half the reviews on my site, most of them being poorly written. So in order to make the site a touch more professional, I’ll be going back and fixing grammar, spelling, and sentence structure. In some cases I might adjust the content of the review itself. With this in mind, I’ll be re-uploading these reviews in order to keep the originals intact. The new versions will be the ones accessible on the Movies, Television & Editorials, and The Review List pages. However, searching and the review archive will lead you to the old versions as well.

Thanks so much to everyone who’s stuck with me thus far and stay tune to these posts to see which reviews I’ve updated!

With four of the 2014 Best Picture nominees featuring the struggles of historical figures and two specifically being the struggles of geniuses, it makes sense that Benedict Cumberbatch would star in one of said films. Cumberbatch has moved safely within his comfort zone from Sherlock Holmes to the character of Alan Turing, dubbed the “Father of Computer Science.” While Turing led a very interesting life, The Imitation Game focuses on his work cracking the infamous German Enigma code of World War II, by creating a computer to sift through the millions of possible solutions to its cypher.

In 1951 a police officer is curiously investigating a break-in at Alan Turing’s residence, only to find that all information about the man is classified. In 1939 Turing is hired to be a part of the top secret program to crack the German code, making enemies out of his bosses and colleagues immediately. Slowly he gains support and enlists several mathematical geniuses to help him, including sole female member Joan Clarke, played by Kiera Knightly. The film’s drama operates mostly on people’s lack of faith in Turing, with several scenes of him stammering out a confused defence to either his military overseers or his partners. It seems astounding that so many people of such a high intelligence can’t comprehend Turing’s rather logical plan. While not an expert on Turing’s life, it seems that this is a cliche and lacking source of drama, probably because it wasn’t one in reality.

Turing’s homosexuality would seem like the obvious choice for Oscar-worthy drama, but despite the epilogic captions emphasizing its greater historical context, it is ultimately a sub-plot. While Turing’s social ineptness and homosexuality may be the emotional heart of the film, the key scenes and major turning points all hinge on his machine. Turing himself acts as a machine, but with the aid of Joan Clarke as the one true friend he gains, Turing comes out of his emotional shell as the film goes on. It’s certainly interesting to see emotions bubble up inside someone incapable of handling them due to a lack of exposure, but it never quite emotionally resonates. Towards the end of the film when Turing’s outed and subjected to hormonal treatment, it becomes painfully clear that the emotional connection the film thought it was building up, isn’t there. Perhaps it’s the film’s emphasis on narrative and melodrama in the first two-thirds that result in its genuine efforts feeling empty. When you attach a film’s core to a machine and not a person, you’re leaving out factors in the equation, bits in the cypher, and creating a flawed and hollow result.

While smooth and comfortable to watch, easy and entertaining to digest, The Imitation Game is nothing more then a well-oiled machine. A machine pumping out a calculated and predictable result. One that imitates the genuine films that came before it, but without the key that will crack the code of greatness. If the film’s thesis of “Sometimes it is the people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine,” then it is also evident that those we can easily imagine something of can do the things we easily can imagine.

Boyhood: a film shot over the course of 12 years, starting in 2002. Having been born in 1995, I’m only a year older than the protagonist, Mason. His childhood is my childhood, and to a small extent, his film is my film. There are thousands of people out there who will review this film but only a handful will be able to connect to it on this level. That’s not to say the events in the film happened to me, but rather it’s just a fundamental understanding of what a character is feeling because you felt it at the same time, with the same music, styles and, events floating around your head.

Of course this film was going to work for me. Of course I was going to like it, but as I watched it I wondered how this film appeals to everyone else. What do they get out of it? Boyhood is ultimately three stories, that of Mason Jr. (Ellar Coltrane), his father (Ethan Hawke), and his mother (Patricia Arquette). Through the eyes of Mason we see the stories of his parents (and everyone else around him) unfold. The stories of their lives weaving through his. Hawke’s Dad struggling with maturity and responsibility; Arquette’s Mom trying to find herself outside of her family, but struggling to care for them nonetheless; Coltrane’s Mason, a boy thrown from home to home, with a constantly evolving idea of family and of life.

Boyhood is less a narrative and more an experience, and a tightly constructed one at that. For being shot over 12 years, Linklater’s film manages to be even smoother than a documentary covering the same time period would be. The experience is so immersive at times that you forget you are watching fiction. As the film goes on though, what became puzzling for me was the thematic question: What is this film actually about?

Your identity? Your path in life? The people around you?

This question started to bother me about two thirds through and I finally started taking notes, probably a little too late. Appropriate, putting it in contrast with my life. Normally I wouldn’t review a film I don’t feel I have full grasp of, but in this case, as in life, I think the experience is more important than the analysis.

In case you haven’t guessed, Boyhood is ultimately about life, and because of this, it’s somewhat open-ended as to what its themes are. Everyone will (hopefully) pull something different from it, as they would any other two hours of their life.

In the final moments of the film a high teenager yells to a beautiful desert landscape that “all of time” has opened up to him. Meanwhile, Mason and a cute girl are talking about moments: how they seize us and how life is just a series of them. In there is perhaps the most important message to me: Despite the fact that Boyhood is all of time, Mason’s time, laid out in front of us, what ultimately matters are the moments.

Boyhood is not a film with some overarching plot or fight against a bad guy, but rather just that: moments that compound onto each other until they finally start coalescing into something with meaning, hence why it took me so long to realize I should be paying attention.

The best films try to teach you something about life. Boyhood is a film that asks you to teach yourself about life. There are hundreds of thousands of people who will watch this. Out of them, most will find it cute, but ultimately uneventful. Some will feel the meaning, but go to bed unaffected. A handful will be impacted, permanently and deeply. I like to think I’m the latter. Boyhood is a film that will stay with me forever. A film that encapsulates my childhood, but will hopefully still find lessons to teach me no matter what period of my life I’m in.

So there it is. What a 19 year old with the same video games, dorky clothes, and angsty attitude towards the world thought of Boyhood. Thought you ought to know.

Who the hell reviews a podcast? Who reviews a nonfiction series of episodes that have no formal narrative, no set structure like even a documentary has? It’s true that in theory the idea of a critic analyzing a group of people around a microphone seems… rather excessive, but Serial is not the production of a couple of geeks with microphones. Serial, co-produced by NPR and specifically This American Life, is far more than that. It’s the product of the sweat, blood, and tears of Sarah Koenig’s tumultuous journey through the case of Adnon Syed. The culmination of 15 months of fascination and hard work on the part of Sarah and her producers. With the NPR association there is a certain level of budget and technical professionalism, but within the 12 episodes of Serial there is not just fancy audio mixing and elaborate reporting, but heart. Real heart. The kind that we easily forget exists, until a particular piece of art reminds us of it. That word, “art,” is one I’m quite willing to apply to Serial, one of the few podcasts out there deserving of that classification (another would be Welcome to Night Vale for clarification).

Be warned, if my prose feels flowery it’s because I just finished listening to the final episode and the style of writing used in not just Serial, but This American Life as well tend to leave a lasting impression in my mind. It’s a way for the author to report the facts while also turning a phrase, to weave a narrative around the developments as they come. Perhaps it’s this writing style that allows Serial to achieve what many believe to be the ultimate goal of art: to teach us or get us thinking about life, humanity, or the world we live in. Most media doesn’t do this and I used to be skeptical of this standard as far too high of an expectation to have. However in the afterglow of such a shining example of it, one that wasn’t a 500 million dollar movie or a 24 episode TV series or an avant garde painting, but rather a simple 10ish hours of audio, I find myself willing to maintain that standard. I don’t mean to demean podcasting as a medium, but to this day the majority of its content is informal at best. I should know, I’m the proud host of one.

It is my hope that Serial represents the future of podcasting. The beginning of its transcendence as a medium into art and mass consumption. A new spectrum of low to high budget, artistic to blockbuster, star-powered to geeks in their basement. Podcasts that capture the imagination of the country like Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, and to an extent Serial. While I know it won’t, I hope that the heart and integrity of Serial is maintained in this future of podcasting. So that the realm of storytelling can advance, giving us an emotionally rich catalog to choose and learn from.

Not much detail is needed, nor should be given to someone before they listen to Serial. It’s a podcast about the murder of a high school girl and the man who was accused of killing her. 15 years removed, every aspect of his guilt/innocence is examined, with the hopes of proving whether or not he actually killed her. You don’t need much more than that. Go listen to the first episode. It’s 45 minutes of audio, so it’s easily consumed. One episode is all you’ll need to either get hooked or not.

Like I said though, Serial goes above and beyond. It has left an impression on me, taught me lessons about life. I’ll never take for granted the daily occurrences of my existence, for I never know when they’ll be thrown into the warped light of a courtroom. I’ve always seen the world in shades of grey, but now I’ve never been more certain in this belief. Most importantly, and I think most relevantly, I’ve learned to never reduce a crime or event to a set series of facts, for there are always details I’ll never know and sides to the story I’ll never hear. Serial is ultimately a tale of ambiguity. Take what you want from it, feel how you want about it. Yours is merely another voice in the cacophonous symphony, another piece of the big picture.

As some of you may know, I frequently attend anime conventions, spreading the Gospel of Geek Juice through the handful of panels I do. One of my more popular ones panels is “Japanese Horror: Anime vs Film” where, as the title suggests, I discuss horror anime, or the lack thereof, and the tropes and history of J-horror in general. Inevitably I’m asked questions about my thoughts on Movie A or if I’ve seen Movie B, but there’s one question in particular I love to get asked: “What are your thoughts on modern horror and the state of the industry?” It always provokes great discussion, but no matter the path that discussion takes the conclusion is usually “Indy horror is where it’s at.” However, if you asked me to name a handful of great Indy horror films from the last few years I’d be hard-pressed to think of many. It’s partially because I haven’t seen much, partially because the majority of what’s out there is low quality and derivative, and partially because I rarely even hear names of good horror movies thrown around for me to blindly recommend. In complete contrast to this, American Mary is a title I’ve heard about since its release, and many people I respect have called it an amazing film. Directed by the Soska sisters, American Mary shines brightly as a great example of what Indy horror can and should be, giving me hope for the future of horror.

American Mary‘s titular Mary Mason is a med student who is severely lacking in funds. In desperation she turns to stripping, but doesn’t even get the chance to do that before her would-be boss Billy whisks her off to save the life of a friend of theirs, of course compensating her $5,000 dollars. Beatress, a… shall we say “unique” individual obsessed with looking like Betty Boop, hears about Mary’s skills and commissions her to perform some body modification on a friend. From here on Mary finds herself teetering on the edge of the wild world of extreme body modification, but isn’t pushed in until she’s drugged and raped by her professor, Dr. Grant. Mary and her world are now forever changed as she sets out to be a successful surgeon in a drastically different way then she had planned.

Ignoring all eloquence on my part, let me simply put that American Mary just works. The premise works. The characters work. The film itself works. The Soskas clearly have an understanding of the technicals of cinema and use various techniques to create effective and unique scenes. At the beginning of the film when Mary saves the life of the criminal, she rushes home, pausing when she enters. After the chaos and fast editing of the surgery sequence, the Soskas give both Mary and the audience a second to take in everything that just happened and in that moment we understand every thought and emotion running through Mary’s head. They take the very weird surgeries that make up body modification and pull them into the realm of horror, not through gore as most would, but by concentrating on the violation done to a body in the process.

Mary herself is the crowning achievement of the film, easily being one of the finest horror protagonists I’ve ever seen. She’s not only more human than almost every character I see in horror films these days, but also far more likeable and realistic than most modern protagonists in Hollywood films. Katherine Isabella brilliantly brings Mary to life, but unfortunately she’s not in good company because while the other actors play their roles just fine, they lack the certain energy that Isabella/Mary have.

The film is fairly well paced, cutting off the fat and showing us the essentials of Mary’s descent. Like in a Scorsese film the scenes feel like episodes that all add up together to create a completed story. Unfortunately, American Mary doesn’t hold up its pacing forever and in its second half stumbles, leaving you with an anti-climatic ending. For some this would ruin the film, but if you keep in mind the Japanese philosophy (going back to the beginning) that the journey is more important than the destination, then you’ll most certainly find the rest of the film worth it.

One may want to push a feminist agenda onto this film due to the creators behind it and its content, but I never once thought about examining this film through that lens while I was watching it. Plot wise it feels like a standard, albeit improved, rape/revenge film and there are few scenes that provoke further analysis. There has been a notable lack of female directors in horror, but the solution to this problem is not to make feminist horror movies or prove that female directors are better. Rather, we need more movies like this one. Movies that prove nothing more then that the director, who happens to be a woman, can make a damn fine movie.

I may not have seen the largest number of Indy horror films, but I’d wager that American Mary stands out not just from all indy horror, but from all film. It’s cold without losing emotion, clinical without losing passion, and sophisticated without losing the rawness we expect from horror. There has come to be a large difference between the standards we judge modern Indy horror by and the horror classics by, but American Mary holds up against all standards. It’s one of the finest modern horror movies I’ve seen and one I’ll be returning to even when it’s considered a classic. It’s the kind of film I’m proud to bring up in discussion and I hope that inspires more directors to create films in its spirit, eventually leading us into a world where indy horror can stand tall and proclaim that it really is where good horror’s at.

What are your thoughts on American Mary or modern horror, Indy or otherwise? Sound off in the comments below!
This review and others like it can be found over at the ever amazing Geek Juice Media, for more movie and TV talk head on over to Buck On Stuff, and for more horror go to Hidden Horrors!

This has been a really bad week. Lots of rage and words that shouldn’t be expressed in a public forum.
It’s really hot and I wish I had AC but I know I technically can’t afford it, especially since I can technically live without it.
Why can’t I be creative. I’m so jealous of everyone and I want to be better but I haven’t had a usuable idea yet. I know I shouldn’t push it but I really would like to be creative for once.
Repeating “Green is not a creative color.” over and over probably isn’t healthy.
I almost wish I had someone to talk to about all this, but at the same time the chemistry isn’t quite right with anyone yet. It really sucks not being able to keep track of my thoughts because mood swings are a fucking thing. I know I’m not stable but that doesn’t mean I know what to do about it. I can still function so that’s all that matters. It’ll pass probably just keep popping pills. Wheeeee
I mean I like being a critic and all but it’d be nice to actually put something out that not only I can be proud of but people can like as well. But no I’ll probably just spend my life admiring others creativity. I’ll do my duty.
Green is not a creative color. Apparently walking around in a circle for 15 minutes with a knife in your hand doesn’t spur creativity either.
Random thoughts are random because pop culture reference.
It’ll pass probably. Plus I shouldn’t get too invested, I’ll just stop caring someday anyways. That’s apparently how that works. So many potentials, no possibilities. It’s most annoying.
Nice to be included, but I can’t be by myself as long for some reason.
Fuck you trying to sound smarter then you are.
and Fuck you for being dumb.
and Fuck you for not firing me yet, despite the fact I’m utterly useless to you.
Fuck everything.
I need a haircut.
Thanks for tuning in. This was your friendly reminder that this is a personal blog and I can’t possibly be professional all the time.
Green is not a creative color. All the boys love mandy lane. Mandy lane loves all the boys. Green does not love all the boys. Mandy lane is creative, but not me.
Pleasant nightmares everyone.

There are many stereotypical views of anime: that it’s strangely pedophilic, that it’s for kids, and/or that it’s all tentacle porn. While, yes, for the most part this is true, there are are still plenty of examples where anime transcends these trivial stereotypes and becomes something truly worth placing next to the greats of pop culture. One can of course point to Cowboy Bebop or the insanely popular Ghibli films, like Princess Mononoke or Spirited Away, but there are far more underrated works that deserve attention, particularly those of director Satoshi Kon. To be clear, it’s not that his works are without critical acclaim, rather it’s that his movies are criminally under-watched by the anime community and the movie audience at large. Perfect Blue, his first film, is a masterfully crafted psychological thriller that has been commonly compared to a Hitchcock film. While I disagree that the two are linked in any way thematically or stylistically, it’s hard to not compare how well the two directors handle the genres and mediums they operate within.

Perfect Blue centers around Mima Kirigoe, the former lead singer of the pop group “CHAM!,” who decides to go into acting despite the pop idol stigma around her. Her first project, the gritty crime drama series “Double Bind,” leaves a few fans upset, particularly the mysterious stalker “Me-Mania.” Mima receives a fax reading “Traitor” and an explosive letter in the mail, but is continually assured by her manager Ruma Hidaka that she should just ignore it. Ruma urges Mima not to going along with the writer of “Double Bind,” who wants her to participate in a rape scene that will lead to her part becoming bigger. In order to help her career and not let down everyone who helped her get to where she is, Mima goes through with it, but not without hesitation as it means the sure death of that innocent pop star image she had. A website she finds that chronicles her life in an eerily accurate way doesn’t help either, as it idolizes that pop star persona of hers and soon she starts hallucinating that this very persona is criticizing her. As her career starts to spiral out of her control, her state of mind fragments and her sense of reality slips away dramatically.

Perfect Blue is an interesting look at the entertainment industry and how daunting it can be to its young entrants. The dynamic and clear-cut characters that populate the sets and meetings give the film a sense of reality, but leave it a little cold (as it should). While it’s not clear what age Mima is supposed to be, the film is most certainly a tale of reaching maturity and shedding your childhood, and this is unfortunately best shown in the rape scene shoot. The similarity between the costume she’s wearing on set and the costume she wore on stage as part of CHAM! make it abundantly clear that she is “letting” her childhood be violently destroyed. What’s left of her afterwords is unclear.

Satoshi Kon does a brilliant job of messing with the audience’s sense of reality through the characters’ delusions. The dual appearances of “Idol Mima” to Mima, as a way of taunting her and degrading her actions, and Me-Mania, as a way of egging him on ever closer to violence, confuses the audience into wondering if the delusions could possibly be connected by some supernatural force. As Mima’s sense of reality completely breaks into a series of loosely connected and repeating scenes, we as the audience have no sense of what’s real and what’s not.

Despite its discontinuous nature, Perfect Blue has a fairly simple narrative and the confused reality that the audience experiences throughout the film ultimately adds to the enjoyment of the journey to the end. Satoshi Kon could have left such confusion out, but he didn’t because, unlike most directors in anime, Kon has a sense of artistic style as well as narrative structure. Kon approaches an anime film like a film and not an anime, keeping himself separated from the Otaku culture that most anime producers are inevitably pulled into. Surpassing even great directors like Hayao Miyazaki, Kon has a fantastic sense of editing and cinematography. There are shots in Perfect Blue that will leave any cinephile stunned at their beauty, accentuated by clever editing techniques.

Perfect Blue has a slow first two acts, but its tension keeps you believing that it’s building towards something. If you wait patiently the third act will blow you away by proving that Perfect Blue is not just a fantastic anime or an exciting thriller, but an impressive film. Period. The animation isn’t the highest quality, but it gets the job done (and better than live action could). Many people brag about anime’s “mature storytelling” all the while showing those they brag to a series that arguably is no more mature than an episode of CSI, however Perfect Blue actually lives up to this claim. I highly recommend it to not only anime fans, but to anyone seeking a good mystery/thriller film and to those who scoff at anime as just pantsu-filled cartoons.

To all Animinneapolis and Anime Central attendees who have stopped by my site post-panel!
Thanks again for attending and I hope to see you at other panels I do at future conventions!
Hinthint I’m working on a panel about being a critic on the internet right now
Anyways if you want to check out more of my stuff in the upcoming weeks, not to mention the great work of my coworkers then by all means please head on over to Geek Juice Media!

If there’s one bit of knowledge you should pick up from the following review it’s this: NEVER GO SEE MOVIES IN JANUARY. It’s a dumping ground of all the movies the studios didn’t want to release in the previous year or have no better time to release the rest of the year. Looking at the chart on Rotten Tomatoes there are only one or two movies released this year that have a score above 50%. So far this year we’ve had the Asylum-wannabe Legend of Hercules, the horrendously unfunny Ride Along, the hispanic bore-fest Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones, the Godfrey-Hoed 47 Ronin, and coming up we have the doomed I, Frankenstein (which I’m sure will follow in the footsteps of Dylan Dog and Priest as being a not too bad, but horribly cliched movie that ruins a great premise) and That Awkward Moment where men act like assholes… like every other comedy these days. So Devil’s Due already has that going against it, let alone the fact it’s yet another found-footage film and that it seems to be a remake of Rosemary’s Baby. However, does it manage to scrap it’s way to excellence despite these handicaps? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. No.

Devil’s Due is the story of a newlywed couple who finds themselves expecting after the wife is impregnated on their honeymoon by a mysterious cult. The next 9 months quickly become a nightmare as they’re plagued by the wife’s unusual violent outbursts, telekinesis and lust for blood. The conspiracy deepens as they seem to be followed everywhere and people in their lives seem to disappear, leaving the husband on a desperate search for answers (filming all the way).

Found-footage/Mockumentary is a style of filmmaking that has exploded into the horror community and very slightly into other genres, mainly through the independent movement. Found-footage is absolutely dirt-cheap to make and they turn regular horror movie profits, which is why studios love them so much. Many horror fans despise them for being slow and anti-climatic with terrible acting and effects. My argument back is that most horror movies have terrible acting, a good chunk have shitty effects, and for the first 50 years of horror the movies were slow-paced. I actually like a few found-footage movies, like The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity, and to a certain extent Paranormal Activity 2 and 3. While I had great experiences viewing them for the first time they all have no re-watch value. Chronicle, which isn’t horror, but still a film I thoroughly enjoyed, is probably the only one I would go back and watch again for the purposes of actual entertainment. Mockumentary’s a film-style I can respect if a) it’s just a style and their are no in-story cameras (Chernobyl Diaries) or b) if they have cameras in the story and use them properly (Blair Witch, Paranormal Activity). Devil’s Due doesn’t fall into either of these, with a myriad of inaccuracies that on their own are the nitpicks of a film nerd, but combined create a lack of believability in the story (which is the whole point of found footage). There are tons of camera angles that shouldn’t exist, but do because the director said so. The cameras all look the same with maybe a filter thrown on, despite being radically different models. The husband even mentions that the tape is gone despite the fact the movie is clearly shot in digital HD. If you’re going to be found footage, make the effort to be found footage. There was no reason this movie needed to be found footage other then the fact that the writers couldn’t come up with anything original and scary enough for the studio to put more money into it.

Now since we can pretty much ignore acting or effects and just assume they’re shit, lets go to the scares shall we. The most important part of a found footage movie are the payoffs of all the build-up and suspense the relatively slow paced rest of the movie creates. At least thats how it’s supposed to work. Devil’s Due is slow paced alright, letting us watch the marriage and honeymoon of these fairly boring protagonists. I understand the theoretical purpose behind this as it’s intended to get us invested in these characters, however it’s completely ineffective as the only defining characteristic the guy has is that he likes to film stuff and while the girl actually has character and is interesting to watch, it doesn’t matter since she gets possessed and becomes the antagonist. Let’s contrast this with Rosemary’s Baby, where Rosemary is in a similar situation, except she has her faculties the whole time and it isn’t until the end where she loses it. The mother here goes bat-shit insane half-way through the movie and we might as well be watching The Exorcist from that point. Well except for the fact that The Exorcist was scary, and this movie is inept at building any tension or suspense to make it’s frequent jump-scares anything more then cheap tricks. The film relies almost entirely on jump-scares and the rest of it’s fear tactics involve breaking a window, eating raw meat and a hilarious scene where a bunch of kids get thrown around like a scene out of Chronicle. It’s hard to describe why there appears to be no threat here and yet there is in movies like Paranormal Activity and Blair Witch, but rest assured you have nothing to be scared of when watching this film except for when you look at your watch and discover just how little time has passed.

A colleague of mine who I frequently disagree with on movies stated that Devil’s Due is nowhere near as bad people make it out to be and that it’s actually worth a trip to the theatre if you’ve run out of December releases to see. While I think it’s true that this movie is not the worst thing ever made and that it doesn’t deserve the 17% rating on Rotten Tomatoes it has right now, it’s nowhere near worth the current $12 movie ticket price. If anything this movie is just blatantly mediocre and with a different director it could have actually been an interesting take on the devil baby storyline. As it stands though, there are plenty of movies far more worth your time if you’re interested in these themes, but if you really are curious about this movie then just wait until it hits Redbox. If you do want a devil pregnancy story then I recommend the slow but effective Rosemary’s Baby or even the first season of American Horror Story and if you want a found footage movie then check out, if you haven’t already The Blair Witch Project, the oft forgotten The Last Broadcast, and if you don’t want horror then Chronicle. Before I resign my keyboard for this review I would just like to emphasize that you should really hold off going to the theatre until February as odds are your viewing experience will be less then pleasant. Thats not to say all January releases suck but there certainly is never an Oscar winner among them.